Suncadia Resort

This month's feature rink is an outdoor skating rink at the Suncadia Resort near Cle‐Elum, Washington in the beautiful Cascade Mountains. Suncadia is a spectacular 6000 acre residential resort that was conceived with the idea of creating a year round playground where family and friends can enjoy their time together. In summer, recreation includes 36 holes of golfing, 40 miles of hiking, swimming and fishing. With an abundance of snowfall in the winter there is downhill skiing, cross country skiing and snowmobiling.

No wintertime resort is complete without an outdoor ice skating rink and Accent Refrigeration Systems added a few environmentally friendly twists to this one.

The construction of the plant room was in tune with green building design. The heating set‐point is limited to 45 F and there is a vegetated green roof, which are becoming very common. The green roof design is proven to reduce winter heat loss by 28% and they prevent rain runoff which is becoming a problem in populated areas. With the poured in place concrete walls combined with the green roof, you cannot hear the operation of the refrigeration system. An outdoor ice rink, being exposed to the sun, wind and rain, can require significantly more refrigeration horsepower and consume much more electricity than an indoor rink depending on its location. In recent years, more and more outdoor ice rinks are springing up in warmer climates so it has become imperative that we take every effort to design responsibly with the mandate of reducing energy consumption and recovering as much valuable heat as possible.

As with any refrigeration system, the by‐product of the refrigeration process is waste heat. In an indoor ice arena it is fairly easy to find a use for the excess heat such as heating the building or domestic hot water. However in an outdoor ice rink which in many cases is not integrally connected to an indoor environment there are fewer opportunities to use the waste heat. At the Suncadia facility we automatically added heat reclaim for hot water as it is always needed by the ice resurfacer. As in all of our installations we did not want to waste the abundance of heat so we decided to install a heat exchanger to capture 100% of the waste heat to melt the snow on the sidewalks around the ice rink as well as in front of the compressor room and along the road to the ice resurfacer.

In total, 700 feet of pathway had heat rejection pipes imbedded in them and the results were fantastic. Rather than seeing the typical plume of waste heat common outside an ice rink, the sidewalks in essence have become the condenser. Consequently, the maintenance workers job has become a heck of a lot easier with less snow to move. For future consideration, a capped header was provided to supply waste heat to the business community in the future village square that is presently being built.

Accent Refrigeration Systems are world leaders in Ice Rink Construction, Energy Efficiency and Heat Recovery. We have over 50 valuable applications for your waste heat. If you are planning on building a new ice facility or would like to improve the operation of your existing facility, give us a call and we would be glad to work with you to make your facility efficient and profitable.

Summary: This month's feature rink is an outdoor skating rink at the Suncadia Resort near Cle‐Elum, Washington in the beautiful Cascade Mountains...

Summary: This month's feature rink is an outdoor skating rink at the Suncadia Resort near Cle‐Elum, Washington in the beautiful Cascade Mountains...